Right, I had an option to choose it (I think I chose device default, though I'm not exactly sure what it means on Windows but I assume it's like "system theme" on Android).
The whiplash from seeing that selectable on my screen to seeing someone claim it's not there in the same 60 seconds is really something.
There's a lot of HN users who are just absolutely furious about Firefox and will jump into any thread to scream about how much they hate it and everyone involved in making it. The heat behind the complaints is so out of proportion it would be comical if they weren't targeting real people. It's baffling to me the scale of negativity people have to this actually pretty good piece of software existing in an unbelievably hostile product space.
> The heat behind the complaints is so out of proportion
You're talking about a browser that has shed about 92% of its userbase since its peak. Firefox was never a default or a pushed selection, people were drawn to adopt it because they wanted it, and almost all of them were alienated and confused by the decisions that the browser made and continues to make.
In trying to make sense out of this own goal, they see the massive payments from google to firefox, they see firefox intervening in google's antitrust case, they see executives being paid an enormous amount of money for continuous failure, and they watch the slide continue. To see these and avoid understanding this as firefox taking a dive (that should be illegal, would be nice if we had antitrust) is a sort of blindness. It's also not to be blamed on some UI designer who just got there a few years ago - those red herring "real people" - these are corporate decisions.
If I invested with you, and you lost 92% of my money, there's no degree of heat that would be out of proportion.
> unbelievably hostile product space.
If you're subsidized a half-billion a year from your biggest competitor, and you started with a browser that was probably 35% of the market at peak, there is nothing hostile about this product space. It is the easiest job in the world. Especially if the job is to fail.
Graphical applications should never ever never change the UI. Change the default for initializing an empty config, like on a new machine, if you like but never change what's already a running config.
I definitely think it's partly that, but I do think visual redesigns also really strike something primal in the brains of an internet user for whatever reason.
This will expose my internet user age but I remember Marcos Moulitsas talking about DailyKos redesigns, and he noted, correctly I think, that regardless of what you do, a visual redesign will be interpreted as an apocalyptic event to approximately 1/3 of the user base. But it tends to be a flame that burns bright but brief.
Or for another version: there was a time in the history of Facebook where redesigns to the desktop version caused user outrage and mass organization into aggressively titled Facebook groups, protesting for a change. Now I personally think that in many significant respects Zuckerberg is a fool, his investment in meta and VR has been a joke and his perspectives on AI are naive. But I actually think the design and iteration of Facebook itself has been a savvy series of careful iterations, and going this long without shooting himself in the foot is not something to be taken for granted.
Anyway, my point is as a going concern whenever you do a redesign you have to price in a certain amount of recreational outrage from a percentage of the user base that burns bright but brief.
On the other hand, I've noticed that posting anything even vaguely complimentary about FF will often get a bunch of upvotes, so I suspect there's a large base of silent supporters who are similarly baffled by all of the noisy hostility.
Sadly, I think some of the heat is driven by culture war issues so people feel the need to pick a fight rather than simply ignoring something which doesn't suit their needs.
Yes, I could have been more precise. It has a poor dark mode implementation that doesn’t allow per-page toggling (unless I’m missing something). A lot of the things I mentioned are half baked. In my opinion, properly building those features should be higher priority than the bi-annual theme update.
Are you talking about the color scheme of the webpage, not the browser UI? The thing reported by the prefers-color-scheme hint[1]?
Building a whole user interface to declare the setting of that preference per-site seems like a pretty high cost for something that won't be used by very many people. Most people just want the site to match their current preference. Instead, websites usually provide a way to override the setting which is stored as a cookie or whatever. I think overriding that value belongs in an extension, not as a core browser feature.
Right, I had an option to choose it (I think I chose device default, though I'm not exactly sure what it means on Windows but I assume it's like "system theme" on Android).
The whiplash from seeing that selectable on my screen to seeing someone claim it's not there in the same 60 seconds is really something.
There's a lot of HN users who are just absolutely furious about Firefox and will jump into any thread to scream about how much they hate it and everyone involved in making it. The heat behind the complaints is so out of proportion it would be comical if they weren't targeting real people. It's baffling to me the scale of negativity people have to this actually pretty good piece of software existing in an unbelievably hostile product space.
> The heat behind the complaints is so out of proportion
You're talking about a browser that has shed about 92% of its userbase since its peak. Firefox was never a default or a pushed selection, people were drawn to adopt it because they wanted it, and almost all of them were alienated and confused by the decisions that the browser made and continues to make.
In trying to make sense out of this own goal, they see the massive payments from google to firefox, they see firefox intervening in google's antitrust case, they see executives being paid an enormous amount of money for continuous failure, and they watch the slide continue. To see these and avoid understanding this as firefox taking a dive (that should be illegal, would be nice if we had antitrust) is a sort of blindness. It's also not to be blamed on some UI designer who just got there a few years ago - those red herring "real people" - these are corporate decisions.
If I invested with you, and you lost 92% of my money, there's no degree of heat that would be out of proportion.
> unbelievably hostile product space.
If you're subsidized a half-billion a year from your biggest competitor, and you started with a browser that was probably 35% of the market at peak, there is nothing hostile about this product space. It is the easiest job in the world. Especially if the job is to fail.
2 replies →
Graphical applications should never ever never change the UI. Change the default for initializing an empty config, like on a new machine, if you like but never change what's already a running config.
I definitely think it's partly that, but I do think visual redesigns also really strike something primal in the brains of an internet user for whatever reason.
This will expose my internet user age but I remember Marcos Moulitsas talking about DailyKos redesigns, and he noted, correctly I think, that regardless of what you do, a visual redesign will be interpreted as an apocalyptic event to approximately 1/3 of the user base. But it tends to be a flame that burns bright but brief.
Or for another version: there was a time in the history of Facebook where redesigns to the desktop version caused user outrage and mass organization into aggressively titled Facebook groups, protesting for a change. Now I personally think that in many significant respects Zuckerberg is a fool, his investment in meta and VR has been a joke and his perspectives on AI are naive. But I actually think the design and iteration of Facebook itself has been a savvy series of careful iterations, and going this long without shooting himself in the foot is not something to be taken for granted.
Anyway, my point is as a going concern whenever you do a redesign you have to price in a certain amount of recreational outrage from a percentage of the user base that burns bright but brief.
3 replies →
On the other hand, I've noticed that posting anything even vaguely complimentary about FF will often get a bunch of upvotes, so I suspect there's a large base of silent supporters who are similarly baffled by all of the noisy hostility.
Sadly, I think some of the heat is driven by culture war issues so people feel the need to pick a fight rather than simply ignoring something which doesn't suit their needs.
2 replies →
Yes, I could have been more precise. It has a poor dark mode implementation that doesn’t allow per-page toggling (unless I’m missing something). A lot of the things I mentioned are half baked. In my opinion, properly building those features should be higher priority than the bi-annual theme update.
Are you talking about the color scheme of the webpage, not the browser UI? The thing reported by the prefers-color-scheme hint[1]?
Building a whole user interface to declare the setting of that preference per-site seems like a pretty high cost for something that won't be used by very many people. Most people just want the site to match their current preference. Instead, websites usually provide a way to override the setting which is stored as a cookie or whatever. I think overriding that value belongs in an extension, not as a core browser feature.
[1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/A...